Lobster Teriyaki and Other Feats of Culture - Day 3

One of the best things about vacations to Maine is all the Nothing you get to do. If you are looking for a few days of jam-packed, uninterrupted, 100% unfiltered Nothing, northern Maine is your paradise. Couches are just a little bit softer there. Beds just a little bit deeper. Pajamas and blankets cling just a little more warmly and comfortably. The air there, or maybe its the water, or likely some proprietary blend of the two, is a barbiturate without equal. I arrive in Maine every time with a to-do list of places to go and things to do, and every year on wrapping things up I find I was a little too sleepy the entire trip to actually pull the list out of the suitcases. For example, in the evening my Dad will invite me to go out and work in the woods with him. I’ll willingly accept, looking forward to some brisk outdoorsyness. Come morning, or rather lunchtime, when I drag myself out of bed, I will greet my Dad as he comes back in the house all sweaty and covered in sawdust and he’ll ask with a smirk how I slept. It is a wonderful form of slovenly laziness that really should be packaged and sold at box stores across the nation.

But all the full-contact bed-wrestling aside, there are nevertheless a few must-dos when we get to Mimi and Grampy’s house - aside from getting our Mimi and Grampy hugs in, of course. One of our favorites is our semiannual assault on Grandma Betty’s blueberry bushes. My grandmother’s farmhouse boasts a half dozen of the most prolific blueberry bushes in the state. Big and burgeoning, these bushes give everything they’ve got each year to provide more blueberries than all our extended family and most of their Patten neighbors can deal with. So every time we’re there we descend like vultures upon the bushes vowing to strip them clean, and come away gallons later without having made a visible dent.

Blueberry day laborers ready to hit the harvest.

Hiroko finally gets her view of Mt Katahdin on the way to the farm.

Positions, everyone!

I feel obligated to document these bushes in text and photos now in order to establish my credibility for the future.  Because when I’m old and crusty(er), and my grandchildren are bouncing on my knee, I will regal them with these stories and they will inevitably dismiss them, relegating them to the dustbin of history as so many ludicrous old-man tall tales, akin to $10 movie tickets and the elevation gains suffered in all those winter treks to (and from) school.

When we had picked all the blueberries for which we had tubs to carry we took a stroll, probably for the last time, through the old farmhouse. A few years ago my grandmother became too frail to continue to live there by herself and has been living in a care facility. The house has been sitting empty all the while, though my Dad is down there taking care of it pretty much on a daily basis. But last year the house and the barn beside it was put on the market and earlier this year it was sold to an American family in China who would soon be returning stateside. They were scheduled to take possession and move in in the fall. It was weird walking through the oh-so-familiar house for what is likely the last time. A garden variety Maine farmhouse, all the rooms are tiny, though as a child they sure seemed enormous. And other than the perceived size, they haven’t changed an iota in decades. All the details, the 70’s carpet, the 50’s and 60’s furniture and decorations, they are firmly burned into my mind. The big kitchen table where my grandfather would preside over epic games of scat with the aunts and uncles and cousins. The old couch right there in the kitchen, nestled up against the wall heater where I would love to curl up in the evenings, usually with one of the many iterations of Welch corgis that passed through, and fall asleep while the adults murmured on over coffee and whiskey. The pantry - Grammy Betty never felt comfortable with us kids poking around in it, so it was all the more intriguing because of it. (And now my kids were running roughshod through it.) The upstairs bedrooms with the gabled ceilings. The narrow, narrow staircase whose steps were just a little bit shallower and a little bit steeper than they should have been. The bathroom on the second floor with the window next to the toilet awkwardly set at about knee level. The spare bedroom that heretofore had always been locked up tight and never discussed, leading to all kinds of speculation of family scandals and potentially literal skeletons in the closet. Walking through it gave me a visceral reaction at every turn.

And then there’s the cellar. I’ve always loved the cellar. It is huge and unfinished and about half of it is filled floor-to-ceiling with cut wood for winter heating. The wood furnace reigns as king of the domain, with its queen, the fall-back oil furnace, standing alongside. There are tools along all the walls and on all the workbenches that emerge tentatively from the shadows. Carts and wheelbarrows and all sorts of semi-industrial machinery clutter around the floor spaces. The whole place smells of wood smoke and diesel and thick greasy oil and lubricants. There are nooks and crannies and pumps from wells deep beneath the cement floor, some working, some not. The ceiling is at Perkins height, which means my parents and I have no issues, but Stacy is perpetually at risk of serious head trauma from all the beams and pipes and braces that support the floor above. And the spiders. I think part of my fascination is all the cobwebs and spiders. There’s something about getting the heebie-jeebies in a semi-controlled environment, though considering their numbers it might be hard to call this environment controlled. The two or three sparse, unshielded hanging light bulbs give it all a harsh gothic cast. It is what every cellar in Maine is, and what, I insist, every cellar should be.

What do you mean, "Watch your head?"

Oh, that's what you mean...

Grandma Betty and
Grandma Bunny

When we emerged from the nether regions Dad motioned to a few boxes on the porch bound for the Goodwill. Old coffee mugs and paperback novels, needlework and linens all fitting the time and place of this oasis in time. We were welcome to pick through it, my Dad offered, and see if there was anything in there we wanted as a keepsake. The kids had a blast rummaging through the knick-knacks and kitsch. L retrieved a vintage glass cup to take home. N found a Maine moose mug he really liked. Stacy chose a few ancient Corelle serving dishes. I found my grandmothers old cut-glass vinegar dispenser. Stacy already had her grandmother’s so we added mine to the set.

What funny looking DVDs!

Out behind the barn Dad had some fresh cut logs that needed to be split for firewood, and he claimed to need a lot of skilled assistants. L and N jumped at the chance for manual labor with an enthusiasm that would never have been seen on the West Coast. While Grampy made mockery of Maine child labor laws, Mimi, Stacy, Hiroko, K and I took a walk down the gravel road through my Dad’s woods behind the farm. He has a 400+ acre plantation of fir trees. Even though it is a somewhat domesticated patch of forest, it still had the rugged harshness of the great Maine outback, with bugs and birds and the tracks and droppings of lots of furry things large and small. Only a few acres immediately around the farm house were sold with the house and barn. This forest was still my Dad’s and that was somehow comforting to me.

If this messes up my nails...

It wasn’t long before Mimi and Hiroko were tired and K was a little too creeped out by the bugs, so they headed back to the farm house on their own. Stacy and I continued on a bit, but never to where we couldn’t hear the rumble of the gasoline-driven log splitter that the kids were risking life and limb on. When we joined the rest of the crew back up at the wood pile we found L and N fully engaged in their role as day-laborer lumberjacks and they were not thrilled with the idea of hanging it up and going back to Mimi and Grampy’s. I found myself in the rather bizarre position of arguing with my kids, trying to convince them to quit working so they could go home and play.

Burdocks - the Bane of Maine

Indistiguishable from local Maine farmhands.

Back to the farmhouse.

The afternoon was filled with what every post-blueberry-picking morning is filled with: a full-on Stacy-lead blueberry-a-thon were every conceivable homemade blueberry products was backed, canned or otherwise preserved. L and K tested their baking skills with Stacy, and considering how quickly the finished products disappeared, seemed to have done quite well for themselves.

Afternoon water gun fight.

Blueberry bonanza!

Bettys Crocker

Not even remotely proud of herself...

The sun goes down late in these northern climes, so given all the picking and hiking and splitting, and all that rich, medicinal Maine air, we were all down long before the sun ever called it a day.


ADDENDUM:  I happened to look burdocks up on wikipedia and was rather surprised to learn that this much-maligned Maine weed is actually a fairly common "vegetable" in Asian cooking, particularly in Japan.  There the root is referred to as "gobō" (ごぼう). The irony of it all is that the Tanakas had our family over for dinner a year or so before this trip, and one of the things Hiroko served that I really liked a lot was... gobō!  Had I known this on our trip, maybe we would have had even more fresh farm produce that evening.